The Whole Sentence Socialist

I do sometimes feel that I am sliding, gin-soaked and bitter, into a into a tutting Tory dotage. That the genetic disposition to Labour sensitivities (Labour? Oh yes, I remember Labour) is being subsumed by the cumulative biography of pricking disappointments and chafing defeats. And the constant reminders that one needn't contribute to benefit.

Why am I slogging to feed the Relevant Mouths when I can look to a relative removed and see a physically fit, well educated and affable enough chap raise his family in subsidised and shrouded comfort at the expense of myself and my idiot cohort of working people? Why have I watched first hand the dissolution of a popular, effective and well subscribed disability service while a junkie-breeding workshy crystal twiddler of my past acquaintance can wince to demand, jump into her free new car and poot off to her next incense market on a tankful of Disability Living Allowance petrol?

Many of us can rattle off much longer lists of job-dodgers and that is galling enough. But when one's natural leftist leanings are slandered by the continual accusation that softy socialists have allowed this deterioration in societal sense it really is too much. It was Socialists who wreaked the bloodshed of the October Revolution, the culling of the Romanovs, the Night of the Long Knives, the cyclical decimations of the endless Five Year Plans. If Stalin's charnel house of a career was not in itself Socialism, it was Socialism that spawned him and licensed him. From Cultural Revolution to Killing Fields, some of the most gruesome and spectacular disseminations of death have been at least in the name of some form of Socialism.

Now, I probably shouldn't appear to condone these occurences and I don't (well, maybe the Romanovs). It really isn't fair though to label Socialism as soft when there is so much evidence of a montrous brutal hardness to be seen.

Socialism in Britain has been a labour movement. That's the important word: labour. It's been about decent conditions and decent returns for working people; about opportunities for those with ability to fulfil their potential alongside their fathers or away from them, regardless of social or economic background. It's about a safety net for those denied a place in dignified employment by age, imfimity or temprorary circumstance. It was never meant to be a scroungers' club, an all-you-can-eat benefits buffet for people with better things to do than play a functioning part in an integrated society. I want my Socialism back: my Socialism, my grandparents Socialism. Not Stalin's, or Mao's or Pol Pot's but Bevin's, Attlee's and Orwell's. And if I can have it without 12 hour shifts at the coal face the tha will be just top.